Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Article in Slate, republished in today’s Star Tribune on-line:

“So let’s drop the pretense. Most politicians standing in the way of background checks for firearms don’t really believe in freedom or limited government. They simply care more about controlling immigration than they do about controlling guns.”

You say that like it’s a bad thing.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

Lawmakers being more interested in curbing law-breaking than attacking the law-abiding?

There oughtta be a law.

To:  Kim Jong-Un, Head Community Organizer, Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea
From: Mitch Berg, American with no real portfolio
Re:  Anticlimax

Chairman Kim,

Seeing this statement…:

Threatening that it would not give any advance notice before attacking South Korea, the North warned: “Our retaliatory action will start without any notice from now.”

…is just a little incongruous, coming on the heels of a weeks-long PR blitz designed to get maximum attention from western media.

That is all.

(CULTURAL SENSITIVITY NOTE:  I know that neither Rikshaws nor Pagodas are Korean.  But I figured it’d work better than typing “그 기차가 역을 출발“.  Am I right, or am I right?)

(TYPOGRAPHY NOTE:  Is anyone but me amazed that one can actually italicize Hangul characters?)

A bill in the Senate would pay your Senators more for the privilege of jacking up your taxes and grabbing your guns – but at least relieve them of the burden of having to tell you about it.

SF 1534, by Senator Sandy Pappas (what else, DFL – St. Paul) would make Legislative pay equal to a third of the governor’s salary…:

The Minnesota Senate on Tuesday is set to approve salary increases for legislators and the governor, who have had their pay frozen since 1999.

…and peg pay increases to the Governor’s salary, which…well, I’ll add emphasis below to explain that bit:

Under the plan crafted and approved by the nonpartisan Minnesota Compensation Council, the governor would get a 3 percent pay increase in 2015 and another in 2016. The governor’s salary would be reviewed yearly after that, with increases tied to the Consumer Price Index. Gubernatorial pay has not risen in Minnesota since 1998 and ranks 32nd among the 50 states.

…meaning that the Legislature would no longer have to go through the politically-fraught process of having to vote themselves pay raises; it’s simply rise along with the CPI.  No questions asked.  No debate needed.  No friction from the fractious peasants, whose own wages, let us remember, aren’t necessarily pegged to the CPI.

TANGENT:  I’d almost place a bet that some Minneapolis DFLer will now say “if we can afford to raise legislative pay, we can certainly afford to raise the minimum wage 33%!”

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails in re my piece yesterday in which Sally Jo Sorenson snarked that there was no way, no how, never ever, that a Gay Marriage bill would oppress people who still exercised belief in traditional marriage:

The proposed statute says there will be no problem, so that ends it, right? Not so fast. The Courts are a separate but equal branch of government. They can snip out bits of the statute, leaving the rest operational, ignoring what the Legislature promised.

For example:

145.412 CRIMINAL ACTS.

Subd. 2.Unconsciousness; lifesaving.

It shall be unlawful to perform an abortion upon a woman who is unconscious except if the woman has been rendered unconscious for the purpose of having an abortion or if the abortion is necessary to save the life of the woman.

[See Note.]

Subd. 3.Viability.

It shall be unlawful to perform an abortion when the fetus is potentially viable unless:

(1) the abortion is performed in a hospital;

(2) the attending physician certifies in writing that in the physician’s best medical judgment the abortion is necessary to preserve the life or health of the pregnant woman; and

(3) to the extent consistent with sound medical practice the abortion is performed under circumstances which will reasonably assure the live birth and survival of the fetus.

[See Note.]

NOTE: Subdivisions 2 and 3, clauses (2) and (3), were found unconstitutional in Hodgson v. Lawson, 542 F.2d 1350 (8th Cir. 1976).

The Legislature passed a law but the Court snipped out parts, leaving the rest.

Just as the Court could decide the mother’s right to be free from government interference in her reproductive freedom outweighed the unborn child’s right to life, the

Court could decide the gay couple’s right to equal protection of the laws outweighs the minister’s right to practice his own religion.

The Court may decide the portion of the proposed same-sex marriage statute that protects a minister’s right to refuse to marry gay people is really an attempt to authorize discrimination against gays, which is an unconstitutional violation of the gay couple’s right to equal protection of the laws. The insulating portion of the statute could be struck down by the Court, leaving gay marriage intact and the minister on the hook for violating the Human Rights Act. And with Liberal Governor Dayton appointing Liberal David Lillehaug to the Supreme Court, Senator Osmek is right to be concerned.

The point is this; thinking the way a law is written when it’s in the legislature protects one, in and of itself, is simply delusional.

Although it does provide good snarking material.

Not that the two are mutually exclusive.

As this is written, news reports indicate two bomb blasts along the route of the Boston Marathon have put over 100 in the hospital.

A suspect – reportedly a 20-year-old Saudi national – has reportedly been detained. Reports say the FBI and DHS are checking him for ties to pro-life, Second Amendment or tax protest groups.

UPDATE: The “Saudi national” story came from CBS, and may have been wrong.  We’ll see.

Sally Jo Sorenson of Bluestem Prairie is – I’ll say it again – one of the tiny list of Minnesota leftybloggers who don’t deserve some sort of police surveillance.

But that doesn’t mean she knows how to tell a complete story – or do much beyond apes John Stewart lite snark at the C-squad level.

About a week back, she took a dig at Senator Dave Osmek and his take on the “Marriage Equality” bill while speaking to a class in Glencoe, in a post titled “Among school children: Sen. David Osmek misrepresents marriage bill in Glencoe class visit”.  Osmek said he opposed Same Sex Marriage on First Amendment grounds.

Sorenson (with a little emphasis added by me):

He must have missed this part of the senate bill. It’s right at the top:

363A.26 EXEMPTION BASED ON RELIGIOUS ASSOCIATION. Nothing in this chapter prohibits any religious association, religious corporation, or religious society that is not organized for private profit, or any institution organized for educational purposes that is operated, supervised, or controlled by a religious association, religious corporation, or religious society that is not organized for private profit, from:

(1) limiting admission to or giving preference to persons of the same religion or denomination; or

(2) in matters relating to sexual orientation, taking any action with respect to education, employment, housing and real property, or use of facilities. This clause shall not apply to secular business activities engaged in by the religious association, religious corporation, or religious society, the conduct of which is unrelated to the religious and educational purposes for which it is organized.; or

(3) taking any action with respect to the provision of goods, services, facilities, or accommodations directly related to the solemnization or celebration of a marriage that is in violation of its religious beliefs.

And then this bit here, with more emphasis added: 

Or maybe this language in the bill:

Subd. 2. Refusal to solemnize; protection of religious doctrine. Each religious organization, association, or society has exclusive control over its own theological doctrine, policy, teachings, and beliefs regarding who may marry within that faith. A licensed or ordained member of the clergy or other person authorized by section 517.04 to solemnize a marriage is not subject to any fine, penalty, or civil liability for failing or refusing to solemnize a marriage for any reason.

I mean, that’s mighty big of the legislature, not unilaterally abrogating the First Amendment and all.

And if you’re not  a church, a religious educational non-profit or, I dunno, a supplier of rabbinical wine or communion wafers?

If  you’re, say, a baker?  A photographer?

Of course, Osmek did actually say…

“I’m afraid it will eventually inflict on religious institutions,” said Osmek. “The pilgrims came here for religious freedom, and we need to respect that.”

But let’s get past the idea that laws, or even the Constitution, actually protect law-abiding people acting in their own conscience, or that the First Amendment actually protects my right to hold government to ccount, or free association, or the right to decide how my children are raised, or the Second Amendment by itself protects my protect my family and property as I, a law-abiding tax-paying citizen, see fit, or that the the Fourth really guards from unreasonable searches and seizures, or the Fifth absolutely protects due process and the right to face my accuser in court, or the Tenth really enumerates powers.  It takes the Constitution and rigorous vigilance.

And it’s not that the left doesn’t see this, although the primary rights for which the left is universally, rigorously vigilant are the “rights” to expel un-gestated fetuses and make dung paintings of the Virgin Mary.

Osmek said that domestic partners are already given benefits by many businesses and corporations, and feels it best left to the private sector to create its own definition of domestic partnerships. . . .

So businesses get to define two committed people’s relationship? Would any married couple accept that?

It depends what marriage is, to you – doesn’t it?

If marriage is a religious thing to you, then you don’t care what government says about it.

If it’s about getting the same rights and benefits that guy/gal couples get, then why would anyone care? Put another way – “so government gets to define two committed peoples’ relationship?  Why would any couple accept that?”

If it’s about showing society who’s boss?

LA Police say they’ll no longer immediately release addresses of people who’ve been “SWATted” – victimized by prank false alarms designed to bring out a maximum, intrusive police response:

The Los Angeles Police Department said Thursday that they will no longer offer immediate information to the media on bogus 911 calls that target celebrity homes.

“We think that whoever is doing this is motivated by watching the police on TV and watching the helicopters come in, and we don’t want to allow that opportunity,” said Cmdr. Andrew Smith.

This is a good thing; it removes a motivation for these potentially dangerous pranks, and it might even potentially free up one of their overstretched supply of scarce reporters to cover the Gosnell trial!

Er, wait – no.  They’ll be busy filing paperwork to find out who’s been SWATted:

Smith said the department will also stop broadcasting the “swatting” calls so news organizations can’t hear the location of the star’s home. The media will now have to file a public records request, which can take 10 days.

They know what matters, after all.

It’s like Easter for Democrats.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Separated at birth?

Pablo Picasso – aka “The John McClain of abstract art”

and…

Bruce Willis – aka “The Pablo Picasso of the action movie”

I can totally see it.

Mower County restaurant in southern MN offers a discount for customers exercising their First Amendment rights (or, as it’s referred to in 1930’s gangster movies and in the not-very-imaginative media and absolutely nobody else, “packing heat”):

Steve Nagel owns Langtry Cafe in the Mower County community of Brownsdale. Nagel says every Thursday is “conceal and carry day.” Customers carrying their guns to the restaurant will get 15 percent off your meal. And if you carry a gun openly, it’s a 25 percent discount.

Nagel’s restaurant has hosted conceal-and-carry permit classes in the past. KAAL-TV reports two classes next month are already sold out.

Nagel says most of his customers have a permit to carry, so he doesn’t mind giving them a discounted meal for demonstrating their Second Amendment rights.

Note to Twin Cities restauranteurs; do you have any idea what an enthusiastic market shooters are?

Just saying.

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talkradio show – brings you the best in Minnesota conservatism, as the Twin Cities media’s sole source of honesty!

• I’ll be talking with new Minnesota GOP chair Keith Downey about his plans to complete the turnaround of the party.  I’m also scheduled to talk with Sen. Dave Thompson about the session.
• Brad Carlson is back on “The Closer” from 1-3 tomorrow. Tune on in!

(All times Central)

So tune in to all four hours of the Northern Alliance Radio Network, the Twin Cities’ media’s sole guardians of honest news. You have so many options:

• AM1280 in the Metro
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Join us!

One of the worst aspects of our current hyper-polarized political climate is that many institutions that the American people used to rely upon for something close to objectivity and reliable, politically-untinted information have turned into partisan propaganda.

Journalism is long gone, of course; the notion of the “objective” media died among anyone who pays attention nearly four decades ago.  The civil service bureaucracy is largely beholden to the big government unions.  Clergy at all too many mainline Protestant and Catholic churches are air-headed liberal chanting-point-bots.

And now, the left is trying to co-opt science – or at least how the public perceives science.

One of the cultural left’s favorite conceits is to try to wrap itself in the trappings of “science” – or, like the Wizard of Oz, at least enough trappings to keep the ignorant in line.

And I’ve seen few more brazen examples of this than Susan Perry’s interview in the MinnPost last Tuesday with Dr. Steven Miles, who Perry credits as “a professor of medicine and bioethics at the University of Minnesota”.

The list of titles lends credibility to Dr. Miles’ responses.  And apparently Ms. Perry thinks that’s enough.

As we’ll see, it’s not.

Establish The Boogie/Straw Men – Perry opens the door for the de rigeur nod to Alinsky:

MinnPost: Do you believe that public-health officials are doing enough to reduce gun violence? 

Before Dr. Miles gets to his answer, I’d like to draw your attention to Berg’s Seventh Law: “When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty or the truth, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds.”

 Dr. Steve Miles: No, I don’t, and partly it’s because they’re hamstrung. Since 1996, the NRA, which also functions as an anti-science institution, has cut U.S. funding for gun-related research from a public-health perspective by over 95 percent. So, in terms of impairing the types of data collection and data analysis that’s necessary to do a public-health perspective, we’ve currently wound up in a situation where the science itself is impaired.

“Anti-science”.

“Racist”.  “Anti-Woman”.  “Bigot”.

They’re all slurs that the cultural left uses to try to cow conservatives into silence and compliance.

But the public health community impaired its own science decades ago by allowing itself to be co-opted into an arm of the gun control movement.  “Public health research” is paid for by anti-gun groups (a fact that’s never reported by a media that seems to have lost interest in afflicting the intellectually and politically comfortable).  Indeed, an amazing preponderance of “academic inquiry” into the Second Amendment is paid for by anti-gun organizations like the Joyce Foundation – legal, political, and academic, across the board.

As to the actual “science” that Dr. Miles is flogging?  We’ll come back to that.

Facial Absurdities – Next, Miles turns to the left’s canonical notion that without guns, everything would be juuuuust fine:

MP: What do you think will most surprise your audience on Wednesday about gun-violence statistics?

SM: Clearly, everybody understands that having a gun available increases the lethality — that is, the deadliness — of the suicidal impulse. If one has a suicidal impulse and there is a gun available as opposed to a knife, then the suicide attempt is much more likely to be lethal.

I’ll give Miles this much:  everyone knows that mental illness and guns don’t mix.

But availability of guns has little to do with suicide rates.  The suicide rate in the US is statistically identical to that in the UK, with its celebrated gun ban.  It’s a shade below Cuba, where only police and the military have guns.  It’s 15% lower than Hong Kong, where guns are not part of the culture; a little over half those of China and Japan, where civilian guns are strictly banned.

One – or Dr. Miles – could reply “but that’s a matter of cultural differences”.  And then one would be onto something,  something that applies across the gun control debate.

We’ll come back to that, too.

What’s so interesting is that it’s also true for homicide. The idea advanced by the NRA people is that homicides are basically done by monster criminals. But what really seems to be going on is that as the number of guns increases, as more houses have guns, as the gun saturation in the society rises, it’s the availability of guns that turn ordinary interpersonal disputes, including domestic disputes, into lethal events.

And if sheer availability of firearms were the dispositive factor in determining whether disputes turned lethal, then the streets of DC and Chicago would be relatively placid, and rural Montana, Utah and North Dakota would be shooting galleries.

But the opposite is true.

And in fact one could note that murder in, say, Chicago – where guns are legally illegal – is far from evenly distributed; some neighborhoods are as safe as suburban Fargo, while others are vastly more dangerous than Baghdad.

And one could fairly note in response that parts of the rural South – where guns are generally very available – have fairly liberal gun laws and high rates of violence.  But cities in those same areas are often quite statistically placid.

So when Dr. Miles says…:

So homicide looks very much like suicide in being gun-prevalence-driven.

…one must add “except when you look at actual facts and stuff”.

And?  And?  AND?  – One of the left’s favorite tactics in the gun debate (as with so many debates) is to give an emotionally-chilling (and thus manipulative) factoid with no context whatsoever.

Right on cue: 

MP: One of the statistics in your presentation that jumped out at me was the high number of American children who die in gun accidents. As you note, the accidental gun death rate is 11 times higher among 5- to 14-year-olds in the U.S. than the combined rates of 22 other high-income developed countries.

Hm.  That must be some number.

SM: It’s a very sad number.

And I’m sure when we see that number – the number of children killed in accidents – it’ll make our hearts ache.

When you have a gun in the house, for kids there is a 16-fold increase in the risk of a lethal accident involving a gun.

Oh, my.

So what’s the number?

So, despite what everybody says about gun education and gunlocks, it just doesn’t work.

Hm.  OK, so I’m sure the number will bear this out.

What’s the number, again?

A gun in the house is an accident just waiting to happen.

So you say, Dr. Miles.  So what’s the number?

MP: As you also note in your presentation, the NRA…

Er, huh?

What’s the number?

According to the CDC, in the entire US, in 2010 (the latest numbers the CDC provides), the number of kids below 15 killed by firearms was…

And yep, every one of those deaths is a tragedy.   Education and gun locks are no guarantee, but they do help.  So does training gun owners in general.

But as a “public health” issue, accidental firearms deaths come in well below:

• Drownings (832)
• Accidental poisoning (220)
• Fires (372)
• Car accidents (forget about it; 1432)

And about the same as the number killed in falls (74).

And so I have to ask (since no “journalist” ever will) – while, as a parent, I recoil at even one  child dying in an accident, I have to ask; what was Ms. Perry referring to when she said “One of the statistics in your presentation that jumped out at me was the high number of American children who die in gun accidents?”  Tragic, yes.  High?

Huh?

Schools Of Red Herrings Say “Huh?” – Miles next goes after the notion of armed self-defense with a hearty “I know you are but what am I?”

MP: As you also note in your presentation, the NRA often says that guns prevent their owners from becoming crime victims. In fact, they claim that huge numbers of gun owners find themselves in situations each year in which they are forced to use their weapons to defend themselves and their families.

SM: I spent some time tracking that down. [And by “some”, Miles apparently means “not a whole lot”.  But I’m getting way ahead of myself – Ed.] Mostly, they cite an article from 1995 by Kleck and Gertz, which cites 2.5 million defensive gun uses per year. But the Cato Institute — which is an anti-gun-control conservative group — took a different approach. What they did is [search] eight years of news clippings. They found only a few hundred events over those eight years — somewhere around 450 or so. That’s a long way from 2.5 million.

This paragraph presents its “data” so very, very misleadingly that if I were a teacher grading Dr. Miles’ paper, I’d swat him on the knuckles with a ruler and have a word with him about intellectual honesty.  To try to introduce him to the subject.

Let me count the misstatements, frauds and lies in the above statement:

1. Only Two Sources?  – Miles cites Kleck (whose seminal 1991 work Point Blank has been the main source for all sides in the debate), and an article by Cato – and that’s it?  Our choices are 2.5 million a year or 450 over eight years?  No reference to the FBI (which estimates about 80,000 deterrences a year)?  Or even Kleck critic David Hemenway, who attempted to “invalidate” Kleck with an estimate of between 55,000 and 80,000 defensive gun uses per year?
2. Misstating Cato – Cato’s research was of a completely different scope and intent than Kleck.  While the research leading to Point Blank was a detailed, academic, scholarly investigation of national figures (Kleck is a professor of criminology), the Cato piece was a glorified blog post, and admitted as much: “it is important to remember that news reports can only provide us with an imperfect picture of defensive gun use in America”; the Cato piece also notes that “Gun control proponents cannot deny that people use guns successfully against criminals, but they tend to play down how often such events take place. The purpose of this map is to draw more attention to this aspect of the firearms policy debate”.

Yesterday, we looked at a piece by Joe Loveland in the Twin Cities leftyblog Wry Wing Politics.  WWP rates my ultimate endorsement for a leftyblog – its author isn’t in line for a harassment restraining order and remedial logic class.

That’s all to the good.

But he cited a series of media polls about the public’s opinion on Universal Background Checks, listed off the top-line numbers…:

• CNN/ORC (89% support background checks)
• Quinnipiac (91% support background checks)
• Morning Joe/Marist (87% support background checks)
• CBS (90% support background checks)
• Fox News (85% support background checks)
• ABC/Washington Post (90% support background checks)
• Pew/USA Today (83% support background checks)
• University of Connecticut (69% support background checks)
• Gallup (91% support background checks)
• Associated Press-GfK (84% support background checks)

…as dispositive evidence that the public overwhelmingly favors universal background checks.

And unlike many leftybloggers, Loveland knows that polls aren’t, themselves, iron-clad.  He takes a whack at a pre-emptive defense of the results:

For those who quibble about question wording, these polls all asked the question a bit differently.

“A bit differently”.

Let’s take a look at the questions asked in the individual polls that Loveland cited:

• CNN/ORC (89%) – The 89% response came from asking if the respondent supports background checks “If the buyer is trying to purchase a gun from a gun store or other business that sells guns”.  Other questions came in much lower.
• Quinnipiac (91%) – “Do you support or oppose requiring background checks for all gun buyers?”
• Morning Joe/Marist (87%) – “Do you support or oppose legislation that would require background checks for private gun sales and sales at gun shows?”
• CBS (90%) – “Do you favor or oppose a federal law requiring background checks on all potential gun buyers?”
• Fox News (85%) – There were several questions; the one getting 85% was whether the respondent favored “Requiring criminal background checks on all gun buyers, including those buying at gun shows and private sales”
• ABC/Washington Post (90%) – “Would you support or oppose a law requiring background checks on people buying guns at gun shows?”
• Pew/USA Today (83%) – Asked if the respondent supported “making private gun sales and sales at gun shows subject to background checks”.
• University of Connecticut (69%) – asked if the responded supports “a law which would require background checks before people – including gun dealers – could buy guns at gun shows”, which is, by the way, borderline-incoherent.
• Gallup (91%) – “Require criminal background checks for all gun sales”
• Associated Press-GfK (84%) – Asked if US should  “Establish a federal standard requiring background checks for those trying to buy guns at a gun show”
• Strib “Minnesota Poll”/Mason Dixon (72%) – “Do you support or oppose a universal background check on all gun sales, including those sold at gun shows?”

Loveland’s right.  They’re a “bit” different, all right.

And yet they are all exactly the same.  The questions – all of them – float a high-level proposal  (“Should we have background checks at gun shows?”) with no further context.

Like the pro-gun-control push poll from the 1980s I cited yesterday, which showed 85% of the people “supported gun control”, it was a hopelessly broad question – a gauzy proposal that gave the less-informed respondent no context that would help them actually understand the issue beyond the top-level sound bites – far from enough information to give an informed answer.

Valid questions on the subject, questions that provided the context needed for informed answers on the subject, would go something like this:

• “Do you support universal background checks at gun shows knowing that the checks create a paper trail leading to every gun and gun buyer in the country – which is de-facto registration?”
• “Do you support universal background checks, even though criminals don’t subject themselves to background checks of any sort?”
• “Do you support universal background checks, even though violent gun crime has dropped by over 40% in the past 20 years, and the drop has accelerated over the past five years, after the sale of 70 million firearms in the US?”
• “Do you support universal background checks, knowing that in California similar legislation has added about $100 to the cost of every firearm, pricing poor people out of the market for guns to defend themselves, their families and their homes?”

Yeah, I know – there’s bias in the wording of my questions; I’d be happy to work with a poll writer on the actual verbiage. But sometimes you need a biased question to lead you to the truth, and sometimes an “unbiased” question, like the polling questions, are biased by omission (and the uncritical reporting on them is biased by commission).

At any rate, I’m going to hazard an informed guess here; if people know the real-life consequences of “universal background checks” (they oppress the law-abiding, hamper the poor and are useless in preventing violent crime), the results might just drop below “landslide” levels.

Because the fact is, people know this already.  Second Amendment rights have expanded over the past twenty years, and violent crime has plummeted.   Obama’s gun-control push has largely fizzled; “background checks”, useless as they are, are about all that’s left, outside the gun-grabber liberal havens on the coasts.

Anyway – back to Minnesota, and Loveland’s assertions:

For those who argue methodology, these polls all reached a different randomized sample of respondents, and relied on different methodologies.

Perhaps they did; the geographic, demographic and ethnographic details weren’t included in any of the links Loveland provided.   

For those who worry about sponsorship bias, these polls were sponsored by a wide variety of news outlets and academic institutions.

And yet the questions they uncritically asked were all nearly exactly identical.

For those who stress that polls are blunt instruments, these polls did not find slim margins that conceivably could be slightly off.

That’s correct.  They found overwhelming support for a hopelessly broad question that, by its nature, filtered all possible context from the results that were reported.  

Of course, this isn’t just about polling “science” to Loveland.  The mission is to try to undercut the Minnesota GOP, which has been gratifyingly solid on Second Amendment issues this session.  (In-line thought bubble: Where the hell was that sense of purpose last session on the freaking stadium? Or in 2011 on the budget negotiations? Hello?)

Make no mistake, on the issue of universal gun background checks, Minnesota Republicans are choosing to represent the will of NRA lobbyists over the will of the overwhelming majority of Minnesotans, including gun owners, Republicans, Independents and Greater Minnesota citizens.

“NRA Lobbyists” are the great lefty boogeymen.  The heavy lifting on gun issues this session, as between 1995-2005 in passing Concealed Carry, has been GOCRA – the most successful grass roots group in Minnesota politics, and the grass-rootsiest successful group in Minnesota politics to boot.  It has no paid lobbyists.  It has no paid anything.  It’s an email mailing list and over 20,000 Minnesotans who write letters and make phone calls.

Legislators report that phone calls and emails against the DFL’s gun grab legislation run about between 50-100:1 against the gun grab supporters.

And Minnesotans are voting with their feet; 135,000 Minnesotans now have their carry permits, and at current pace there will be 200,000 within a year.

None of those figures gives you any more context than the questions in any of the polling Loveland cites.  Or, to be fair, any less.

Frankly, Minnesotans, Republicans just aren’t just not that into you.

And given that the “you” really doesn’t exist outside of a push-poll wording card trick, they’ve got the right idea.

To: The entire sane population of the United Kingdom
From: Mitch Berg, chagrinned Yank
Re: Apology

Dear UK,

My condolences on the passing of former Prime Minister Thatcher, a great influence on me as a conservative.

Please accept my apologies for my fifty-odd depraved countrymen who have disgraced our nation’s upper legislative chamber:

A Senate resolution to honor Lady Thatcher was supposed to pass last night. However, per well placed sources on the Hill, Democrats have a hold on the resolution.

To refuse to honor a woman of such great historical and political significance, who was deeply loyal to the United States, is petty and shameful. One truly has to wonder, what is it about Lady Thatcher that gives them pause? Her unfaltering commitment to freedom? Or perhaps the way she fought for individual liberty and limited government?

Our lower chamber followed the usual protocol:

The House used traditional bereavement procedures, the same model they used for John F. Kennedy. It’s a simple, solemn means of honoring the individual by passing a resolution and immediately adjourning. Similarly, Great Britain’s House of Commons was recalled, bringing members of Parliament back from vacation to honor Lady Thatcher.

How to explain this in British terms?  Hmm.  Democrats are to conservative women what Roundheads were to Catholics, maybe?

“Wry Wing Politics” is one of the painfully small group of Twin Cities leftybloggers who don’t expressly deserve to be under police surveillance.

But that doesn’t mean WWP and its author, Joe Loveland, know how to take apart a complex issue, or dig beneath the hood of a lefty propaganda meme, better than the babbling bobbleheads at Minnesota Progressive Project.

Vide this piece about the polling claiming to show Minnesotans and Americans are lock-step in favor of universal background checks.  Loveland thinks the polls show it’s not even a debate anymore.

And on the surface – as in, the layer that a dust-rag and a spritz of Pledge removes – it looks like he might be onto something:

In politics, presidential candidates who win the support of over 60% of Americans are said to have won overwhelming “landslide” victories. Harding’s 60.3% in 1920. FDR’s 60.8% in 1936. Johnson’s 61.1% in 1964. and Nixon’s 60.7% in 1972. Landslides!

It is so difficult to get 60% of Americans to agree on politics, that such “landslide victories” are considered highly unusual indications of a historically overwhelming level of public sentiment.

So far, so good.  When Americans in all their infinite variety consider all the different issues and perceptions and angles that go into electing a president, a landslide like Reagan’s in 1984 (which, at 58.77%, is mighty close to 60%) is pretty much a mandate.

That’s with what should be a complex decision, like a Presidential election.  Now, you can look at the results of the past two elections and wonder if voters really do put all that much thought into elections, but let’s have some faith in The People and assume that there’s a certain amount of reasoning and, for most people, at least a week or two of thought that goes into elections.

But a public opinion poll? 

In Minnesota right now, Minnesotans of all walks of life, including Republicans, Independents, gun owners and Greater Minnesota citizens, are giving a landslide victory to gun background checks.

Loveland cites the Strib “Minnesota Poll”, which I’ll borrow here:

Pilfered without permission from “Wry Wing Politics”, but with a link back included. Go ahead. Click it. Click the picture. You know you want to.

Now, we’ve gone over this in the past; through most of its history, the “Minnesota Poll” has been a bald-faced DFL propaganda organ, so any conservative is going to distrust but verify their results.

However, I think there’s reason to believe they cleaned up their act in 2012 – the next election will be an interesting one.  So I’m not as inclined to reject the poll because it’s the Minnesota Poll as I used to be.  But they say “trust but verify”, and so I shall:

Loveland thinks he’s closing in for the kill:

The Minnesota Republicans’ point person on this issue, State Representative Tony Cornish (R-Vernon Center) shrugs off this Star Tribune Minnesota Poll with a cavalier “nobody really believes those polls.”

• Or this poll — CNN/ORC (89% support background checks)?
• Or this poll — Quinnipiac (91% support background checks)?
• Or this poll — Morning Joe/Marist (87% support background checks)?
• Or this poll — CBS (90% support background checks)?
• Or this poll — Fox News (85% support background checks)?
• Or this poll — ABC/Washington Post (90% support support background checks)?
• Or this poll — Pew/USA Today (83% support background checks)?
• Or this poll — University of Connecticut (69% support background checks)?
• Or this poll — Gallup (91% support background checks)?
• Or this poll — Associated Press-GfK (84% support background checks)?

Before we address the polls, let’s take a quick trip back in time.

———-

When I first started covering the war on the Second Amendment back in 1986, as a fairly newly-minted conservative talk show host on the weekend graveyard shift at KSTP, it was a very different world.  There were eight shall-issue states, and many states and cities with absolute gun bans.

And when I interviewed a woman, Margolyn Bijlefeld of the “National Coalition to Ban Handguns” (which later morphed into either the Brady Factory or the VPC, I forget which), she flogged a set of polling stats that showed something like “85% of the American people support gun control!”

A landslide!

And so I pounced:  the poll leading to that question simply asked people if they supported “more gun control”, with no elaboration.  Yes or no.  No coloration, no flavor, no nuance.

For those who quibble about question wording, these polls all asked the question a bit differently.

Right.  A bit.

We’ll come back to this tomorrow morning and go through the fallacy of the “overwhelming support”.

We’ll call it “Back to the Future”.  Or that’s what 85% of the writers of my blog say right now.

[1] (I’ve been trying to find any reference to the polls from the eighties; happening as they did back when only Algore had the internet, I’m having not much luck.  If anyone has a pointer, I’d be much obliged)

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

There are companies that buy, sell and trade gold (major banks and investment firms, generally). The actual gold bars are stored by Comex, which stands for Commodity Exchange, and is part of the New York Stock Exchange. Remember the Bruce Willis movie where the bad guys faked bombs in schools to divert cops while the bad guys stole the gold bricks from Wall Street? That’s what we’re talking about – huge supplies of actual gold bricks being stored in vaults for their owners.

Owner who are now pulling the gold out in record amounts. Giant withdrawals. Trillions of dollars worth.

Did they have unexpected expenses to pay? Losses to cover? Fine, that’s what it’s there for.

Or are they grabbing their gold before the economy collapses because they know something we don’t? Not fine, that’s what we’re all afraid of.

I’d stock up on bullets and whiskey but there are no bullets for sale. Which means more money for whiskey, I guess. So that’s not all bad!

Joe Doakes

Como Park

Look!  Guns and abortion!

It had to happen:

I’m figuring it’s more a “Byerly’s” thing than a “Rainbow” thing.

SCENE:  Mitch BERG is running his snowblower down his sidewalk.  Avery LIBRELLE walks by, eating a granola bar.

LIBRELLE:  Why do you hate gay people?

BERG: (shuts off snow blower):  Huh?

LIBRELLE: (dribbling granola crumbs onto sidewalk) Why do you oppose gay marriage?  You’re a bigot!

BERG: Er, no.  As we’ve discussed over and over again, I favor civil unions on libertarian grounds.

LIBRELLE:  Hah.  Two people who love each other should be able to marry.

BERG: Right, but marriage isn’t about love.  Not entirely, anyway.  It’s pretty utilitarian, actually.  It’s about raising kids – and the notion of gay marriage devalues gender, which I think is a huge mistake, since gender is so hugely important in raising kids.  In our society, it’s also about taxes.  Personally, I think government should get out of the business of granting favors through the institution of marriage, but I think gay people should be able to sign contracts with each other.

LIBRELLE:  Pfft.  What are you afraid of?

BERG:  Er, yeah.  On the one hand, that question is an abusive strawman.  I’m not “afraid” of the notion of same sex marriage.  But I’m definitely worried about some of the potential consequences.

LIBRELLE:  (Spit-takes, blasting granola flakes all over the place) Huh?  What are you talking about?

BERG:  It is inevitable than once you legalize gay marriage, government will oppress any person, business or institution that disagrees with it.

LIBRELLE:  Hah!  People who support marriage equality are very sensitive to diversity of opinion, you paranoid teabagger!   And the First Amendment protects your observance of religion absolutely!

BERG:  Right, just like First Amendment absolutely protects my right to hold government accountable, or free association, or choice for my children, or the Second Amendment absolutely protects my right to keep and bear arms, the Fourth absolutely protects me from unreasonable searches and seizures, the Fifth absolutely grants me due process and the right to face my accuser in court, and the Tenth guarantees the enumeration of powers absolutely.

LIBRELLE:  What are you, a lawyer?  That’s just paranoid!

BERG:  So it’s your position that the full weight and power and budget of government isn’t going to descend upon anyone who doesn’t embrace gay marriage?

LIBRELLE:  Yep.  Paranoid paranoid paranoid.  Cray cray.

BERG:   Huh.  Good to know it’s just paranoia:

 Attorney General Bob Ferguson has filed a consumer protection lawsuit against a florist who refused to provide wedding flowers to a same-sex couple.

The complaint was filed in Benton County on Tuesday against Barronelle Stutzman, owner of Arlene’s Flowers and Gifts in Richland.

The lawsuit is in response to a March 1 incident where she refused service to longtime customer Robert Ingersoll. Stutzman did not return a call Tuesday night seeking comment. Ferguson had sent a letter on March 28 asking her to comply with the law, but said Stutzman’s attorneys responded Monday saying she would challenge any state action to enforce the law.

Washington state voters upheld a same-sex marriage law in November, and the lawtook effect in December. The state’s anti-discrimination laws were expanded in 2006 to include sexual orientation.

Ferguson seeks a permanent injunction requiring the store to comply with the state’s consumer protection laws and seeks at least $2,000 in fines.

LIBRELLE:  You’re a racist and you hate womyn!

BERG:  Right, I got that.  But the point is, the precendent is there; government squats on opponents of social policy!

LIBRELLE:  That’s Canada!

BERG:  Right.  But it’s the pattern all governments follow when they want to impose social policy.

LIBRELLE:  (throws granola wrapper on  BERG’s snow-covered lawn)  Why do you dance on the graves of the children of Newtown?

And SCENE

…on a crummy icy snowy windy freezing-rainy morning like this, where streets where you live are like icy streets, and where streets in Saint Paul are like icy Andean goat paths…

…to be able to jet to work on a network of light rail trains?

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the sinking of the USS Thresher.

At the time Thresher was a super-weapon – one of the main demonstrations of America’s Cold-War technological prowess.  Faster and deeper-diving than any previous class of submarines, with a nuclear power plant giving it effectively-unlimited range, armed with the latest guided torpedos and anti-submarine missiles (including the nuclear-tipped SUBROC), it was the lead ship of what was initially intended to be a class of 14 boats.  It incorporated every lesson that the US had learned about submarine warare in World War 2, and everything they’d learned from the defeated Germans, and from the decade and a half of tete-a-tete up to that point in the Cold War.

The sub left Portsmouth, New Hampshire 50 years ago yesterday for a series of deep dive tests, part of its fleet acceptance trials – so a number of the men onboard were civilian contractors from the Portsmouth Navy Yard.  After a day of trim testing, at about 7:47AM, Thresher began its descent to its “test depth” – which, in submarine terms, is deeper than its “operating depth”, but about half of its estimated “crush depth”.

At an estimated depth of about 1,000 feet, a chain of problems occurred, as reported to the attendant sub rescue ship USS Skylark over the “Gertrude”, an acoustic telephone  (developed before World War 2, and still in service on submarines around the world) that allows voice communications underwater;  a silver-braised thru-hull tube apparently ruptured, spraying high-pressure air all over the engine room…

The Skylark, a World War 2-era converted fleet tugboat recommissioned as a submarine rescue ship.

…which shorted out electrical panels, causing the reactor to “scram”, or shut down.

Navy standard operating procedure was to shut off the steam system, helping prevent overly-rapid cooling of the reactor (which could itself cause catastrophic problems under the wrong circumstances, although over a time frame that wouldn’t have mattered in the Thresher’s case.  

Nuclear submarines don’t usually “blow” their ballast tanks to surface (pump out the water with high-pressure compressed air); they usually rely on their “planes” (think airplane elevator fins) and their engine power to surface.  But with the engine shut off and the engine room getting heavier from the burst pipe, the skipper, Commander John Harvey, ordered a “blow” of the tanks.

Which led to the next link in the catastrophic chain; when compressed air expands, it cools off.  The further and faster the compression drops, the colder the air gets.  Spray a can of compressed-air computer cleaner for a few seconds to test it; it gets cold.  Dropping from 3,000 PSI apparently caused the released air to freeze over the ballast tanks’ outflow valves, preventing the ballast from being blown.

The sub likely sank stern-first, down to about 400 feet below its estimated crush depth of 2,000 feet, before the hull imploded, sending a ram of water through the boat at a speed later estimated at 4,000 miles per hour, ripping the three-inch-thick steel of the boat’s hull to shreds.

A piece of badly twisted brass pipe, testimony to the force of the implosion.

The loss of the Thresher – still the worst loss of life in any submarine disaster in history – was a watershed moment in submarine design. At a time when submarines were being built to operate at depths four times greater than during World War 2 – which, let’s remember, was only a decade in the past when Thresher was designed, 15 years when it launched in 1961 – the notion of “quality control” needed a radical upgrade.  The US Navy started its “Sub Safe” program as a result – a relentlessly difficult quality control program that set the standard for intensity of effort and scrutiny of vendors, and may have been one of the most successful government programs in history.

Which has led to a perception that submarines are very safe.  The Thresher disaster garnered massive publicity fifty years ago – and other than the sinking of the USS Scorpion six years later (due apparently to a fire in a torpedo, which led to another safety program of its own), it was the last submarine disaster the US has suffered.

USS Scorpion. An older boat from the class preceding Thresher, its’ loss has been a favorite for conspiracy theorists ever since it sank in 1969; the theory is that the Soviets torpedoed it. It’s the sister of the USS Snook, on which my uncle served, for those of you keeping track.

For the past 44 years, submarine disasters are something that happens to other countries; five Soviet and one Russian nuclear submarines have sunk since Thresher‘s loss.

We’ve had some near-misses; a couple of submarines (USS San Francisco and USS Ulysses S. Grant) collided with undersea mountains and suffered massive damage, but returned to port with their crews alive (and their skippers headed for tours commanding radio towers in Nevada) – but nothing like the Thresher, knock wood.

And yet submarine accidents used to be distressingly common, even in the US; Thresher was the 17th of 18 US submarines lost to accidents.

Apropos not much.

Over the past couple of days, critics – and a few parents – are making the usual outraged noises about MSNBC chat-bot Melissa Harris-Perry and her notion that parents’ idea that they, rather than government and society, are responsible for their children.

On the one hand, the news consumer needs to allow for the fact that Harris-Perry is a media figure who needs to create some sort of commotion to rise above the fray, especially at flailing MSNBC.

On the other?  The notion that government and our “elites” really do believe that they are lending our kids to us at their own sufferance is out there in many slightly-less-obvious ways.

Uwe and Hannelore Romeik are a German couple.  They’re Christians, they’re from Germany, and they brought their three (now six) children to the US when they were threatened with imprisonment for trying to home-school their kids.

And as much opprobium as American society – pop culture, the educational-industrial complex and the like – put on home-schooling here, it’s nothing compared to Germany:

Home schooling has been illegal in Germany since 1918, when school attendance was made compulsory, and parents who choose to homeschool anyway face financial penalties and legal consequences, including the potential loss of custody of their children.

And so the Romeikes, like many before them, came to the US.

To escape such legal action, the family fled to the United States in 2008 and was granted political asylum in 2010, eventually making their home in Tennessee. U.S. law states that individuals can qualify for asylum if they can prove they are being persecuted because of their religion or because they are members of a particular “social group.”

Now – do you consider risking prison and losing your children over choosing to raise their children in a way that is considered perfectly more or less perfectly normal in the US a form of persecution?

I certainly do.

But not the Obama administration:

The board overturned the initial asylum decision, arguing that homeschoolers are not a particular social group because they don’t meet certain legal standards, The board said that the home-schooled population is too vague and amorphous to constitute a social group.

“People who reject the local educational system” – as millions do in the United States with varying but usually minimal repercussions – aren’t a “social group?”

Apparently the only “social groups” the Obama Administration recognizes are the ones that chant about “the 1%”…

Now the family is fighting that decision in the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, which will hear the case on April 23.

“We think we have a pretty strong case,” Romeike family attorney Michael Donnelly told ABC News. “We feel that what Germany is doing by preventing this family and a lot of other families from exercising their rights in the education of their children violates a fundamental human right,” he said.

Donnelly says the right of parents to decide the direction of their child’s education has been established in Article 26, section 3 of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights which reads: “Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.”

Most people don’t realize that compulsory education was part of a process established by Prime Minister Bismark in the 1870s to keep the German government, military and economy fed with the proper ratio of people; 10% officers/management/professionals, 30% non-commissioned officers/foremen/tradespeople, 60% soldiers and sailors/laborers and farmers.  People in manufacturing and retail would call it “supply chain sourcing”.  And the Big System can no more allow parents a role in the supply chain than WalMart can allow a company to hand-whittle their furniture their own way.

Fewer people realize that the likes of Horace Mann adapted the system to the United States in the early 1900s, and for more or less the same reasons.

Over the decades since – decades where people placed misguided trust in government – it became largely accepted that the government school (or parochial schools that largely aped the government style, with uniforms and some carefully-measured religious instruction thrown in for good measure) was not just the best way to educate kids – it was the only way.  That was intentional; public schools are a supply chain source, no less than the ones in Germany; it’s just that the manufacturing standards have changed since the 1960s.

Which is why the idea of school choice – home schooling, charter schools and open enrollment – was so openly and actively denigrated by the establishment.

So the Romeike case will be an interesting barometer of how the Administration views this key human rights issue.

Liberals will occasionally try to sound “moderate” by claiming to favor “partnerships” between government and business.

These “partnerships” usually amount to one of a couple of things:

• The worst of both worlds; the inefficiency of government combined with the lean capitalization of a business
• The government picks a winner

In neither case do things work out well, as a general rule.

Except with this example, perhaps the most successful public private “partnership” in all history.

Just saying; if my financial planner hasn’t put a ton of money into Glock USA and Sturm Ruger, we’re gonna have to talk.

The Democrats nationwide are fond of trumpeting the factoid that “police chiefs’ organizations” and “police unions” roundly favor gun control.

Of course, police chiefs associations are dominated by top major-city cops, who pretty universally serve at the pleasure of liberal democrat machines.  And the Minnesota Police and Peace Officers’ Association is pretty closely tied with DFL-dominated unions, so their opinion is always an extension of the DFL party line on any issue.

When you get into law enforcement groups that depend on popular voting for their jobs – like the Sheriff’s Association in Minnesota, for example – things get a little less predictable.

But what if you polled actual street cops?

Second Amendment rights groups have long known, at least anecdotally, that actual policemen – as opposed to the uniformed politicians they report to in major cities and larger suburbs – roundly support the Second Amendment and the right, and competence, of the actual law-abiding citizen.

But now we know for real:

Among the findings of a survey by the industry website PoliceOne, which tallied responses from 15,000 verified active and retired law enforcement professionals, police overwhelmingly favor an armed citizenry and are skeptical of any greater restrictions placed on gun purchase, ownership or accessibility, editor Doug Wyllie said.

The survey found that 91.5 percent of respondents believe a federal ban on the manufacture or sale of semi-automatic weapons would have no effect or a negative effect on the reduction of violent crime.

There are bad apples on the street, of course.  But most cops know the simple truism that the likes of Representatives Paymar and Martens, Senator Lumberg Latz and Governor Messinger Dayton can’t quite retain; the law-abiding citizen, whether they’re carrying a revolver or an AK47, isn’t the problem.

…I wish I was in New York this week.

UPDATE:  Yesterday was a very, very good day in the Pledge Drive department.  Thanks to everyone who fed the kitty yesterday.

So today’s the last day of the “Pledge Week”.  Thanks to everyone – for stopping by and reading these past 11 years.

But I’ll put the link up one more time, just in case

——–

I haven’t done an actual bleg – a blog fundraiser – on Shot In The Dark for about four years now.

Partly because it felt a little presumptuous, in this lousy economy.  Partly because it just never occurred to me to want to.

Anyway – much as I’d like to do an Andrew-Sullivan-style “Please pony up $80K or I’ll have to leave blogging”-style bleg twice a year, it’s just not true.  I’ll keep writing Shot In The Dark no matter what.

But if the mood strikes you, feel perfectly free to drop a buck or two in the kitty. I’d be much obliged.

Unlike MPR, I’m not going to interrupt programming for twenty minutes at a shot, here.

Thanks in advance!

UPDATE: Fixed the link. Sorry – and thanks!